Currently I am using my K6 build more often and I am actually playing some games. I installed a lot of them, but I am planning on finishing two of them: Rayman 2 and NFS: Porsche. I am getting quite disappointed with K6 performance, but NFS works ok in Glide with low details. Despite low performance, K6 is giving me a lot of fun!

I added / removed few things:
- Fan for Voodoo 3
- 3D printed stand-offs for AWE32
- B3D-FXG2 Voodoo replaced with Diamond 4MB version, as it is more compatible with some games (Screamer 2 for example)
- Removed GUS as i didn't need it yet

Here are some pics taken from my desk. Internals got quite messy, but I will clean it some day.

What a beauty! I'm envious of this little system 😀.

really nice system but especially tower!!

Thank you guys for your replies. As always, it motivates me to push things further and tinker with my systems 😀

Today I obtained very nice Zalman VGA cooler - ZM80C-HP, so it was time to open up P4 machine. Unfortunately, it isn't latest revision with two heatpipes (ZM80D-HP), but it was brand new and cost me about 5 euro. I added 80mm fan (maybe I will find genuine Zalman unit one day) and it is more than enough for my Radeon 9700Pro. Maximum core clock went from 365MHz to about 425MHz! It's more than stock 9800XT! Earlier this week, I also got Zalman CNPS7700Cu for my CPU - stock cooling is for casual users 😁

Mounting ZM80C-HP was trickier than I expected, but I didn't mount clips sticking two heatsinks together, as it required a lot of force to push them in place, and made contact with GPU worse. To my surprise there wasn't any compatibility issues neither with chipset cooler nor RAM sticks (both are taller than usual). Actually RAM stick missed Zalman's heatpipe by about 1mm 😁

Unfortunately I managed to break my previous Radeon 9700 Pro, so now I am using AIW card. I think that it was baked by someone and sold, because it booted few times and then started to display complete mess. I didn't even installed drivers before it died. Anyway, for now I will settle with what I got, play with K6 and keep P4 under desk waiting for games which K6 cannot manage.

I also tested Antec VP-400 PSU which I recapped. It wasn't nicest job I've done, since basically any decent capacitor with required ratings is physically bigger than the crap used by CWT, but I managed anyway. Here are results (and that's P4 for you. CPU was at 3,45GHz 1,55V so imagine what would it look like with overclocked Prescott (keep in mind that I have Northwood. Pretty decent one)):

(from left to right: peak load (hovered around 296W most of the time). idle +12V voltage, load +12V voltage, load +12V volatage after 20 minutes of stress test)
I tested with ATITool 0.2.6 artifacts test set to highest priority in Task Manager and prime95 Small FFTs with single thread as I found that this configuration gives me highest power draw on this system. Antec manages this test nicely, but it runs very hot. I think I will swap it with something more recent and keep it for some Athlon XP build if I ever build one (lately I've got Barton Mobile 2500+ and Epox 8RDA3I so who knows 😀 ).

I also got very interesting card which is Gainward GeForce 7800GS in disguise. It has G71 chip with 24 pipelines and 512MB of 1,4ns RAM making it basically 7900GT. Of course with AGP slot. I chose not to plug it in with P4 as I think that it will fit AMD 939 build better, and I will build such PC one day as I very like this platform.

Here are current pics of my P4:

It isn't nicest looking system, and I even find it not being in my test by myself, but it has it's own charm and 2003 character 😀

I managed to get second Voodoo 2 which is Orchid Righteous Voodoo 2 12MB (thanks to tikoellner !) but I didn't found motivation to make SLI cable yet. Cards are of course unmatched badly with one being Diamond 8MB and the other Orchid 12MB, but maybe I will find second Orchid or second Diamond one day (Diamond 8MB will be much easier to find cheap tho).

As I am getting disappointed with K6-III+ performance, P4 surprised me positively. I didn't managed to run PAT with 1GB sticks, but thanks to tight RAM timings and high memory clock, performance is very nice for 478 build. Here are some numbers:

As always, looking forward to hearing from you guys. Let me know what you think about this build 😀

Kickass! I have the same cooler for my Northwood 3.2 paired with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. They are both quite power hungry and hot 🤣 .

If you ever get too disappointed with that K6 system, send me a PM 😀.

F2bnp wrote:

If you ever get too disappointed with that K6 system, send me a PM 😀.

Haha. I keep saying that I am disappointed, but I always thought that K6-III+ is another quality comparing to K6-2 which I had 10 years ago. Now I know that it is slightly faster, but nowhere near Celeron at similar frequency with decent BX board when it comes to 3D gaming (and FPU related things). It's ok for some early 3D games, but now I know how I overestimated it's performance.

As for the system slowing down with more memory - I'm guessing it's a cache issue.

Don't expect MVP3 motherboards to be able to cache the supported 1GB of RAM, in combination with the L2 cache sizes and Tag RAM chips that will be used on most MVP3 motherboards, expect cacheable memory areas to range from 256MB down to 64MB.

(https://www.anandtech.com/show/72/19)
Your board has only one cache chip. It's not sure how big is it, but it suggests the L2 cache will be rather small.

I recall that in old days, we've used a tool called cct - Celem Cache Test, it might tell you more about the problem.

EDIT: BTW - the case is a real beauty and I am envious! 😁

Cache shouldn't be a problem as I am using K6-III+ chip with integrated 256kB of L2 cache which can address up to 4GB of RAM. If it was for caching issue, I should see reduced performance with 384MB of RAM as well (I have only 512kB of onboard cache, so only 128MB of RAM is cacheable). Recently I saw a clip on youtube done by philscomputerlab, and he stumbled upon the same issue. He had crashes with 768MB, reduced performance with 512MB and everything was ok up to 384MB.

None of this matter in fact, as currently I am using 128MB because more memory doesn't gain me anything in games I play, but I am getting longer post as it takes a while to count 384-512MB of memory.

My adblock hates your image hoster, FWIW, forteller 😁

[EDIT] Oh, it's not adblock... maybe something like Photobucket offsite embedding then? I keep getting "locked.gif - Zdjęcie niedostępne"

Stiletto wrote:

My adblock hates your image hoster, FWIW, forteller 😁

[EDIT] Oh, it's not adblock... maybe something like Photobucket offsite embedding then? I keep getting "locked.gif - Zdjęcie niedostępne"

It has stopped working a short while ago. I've seen the pictures earlier today, but now it's just white rectangles.

Yes, I See it too. I'll try to fix it when I will be at home. But I think I will have to upload those photos somewhere else...

Same here. Can't see the photos.

Ok... this is quite shameful, but I didn't knew that provider I am uploading pics to, counts traffic monthly and all photos here sucked my free gigabyte of transfer. I bought another gigabyte, but we have more than 10 days left and problem would arise every month, so I replaced all thumbnails with small versions. Also, currently all links points to host's webpage instead of opening full-size image. That way, opening link doesn't count as actual transfer so it should help.

I know this is inconvenience and I am sorry for that. I used free account on this provider for more than 10 years now and it is very decent (I still have my oldest photos), but I never put links on such big forum so I wasn't aware of those limitations. Oh boy, you learn something new every day... I will try to find better provider though.

Imgur seems to be trending. There's plenty of image hosters still out there, of course. You can also attach some photos to VOGONS posts if you want.

Oh boy, what a day! I am changing window at the attic, and digging through the boxes I found two nice motherboards. One is Epox EP-3PTA which has nice Tualatin support (along with voltage adjustment if I remember correctly), and <surprise, surprise> Gigabyte GA-5AX! I didn't even knew that I have one! 😁 Both are in mint condition and working properly.

ALI - those three letters bring fear and horror to hearts of many... 😀

Kubik wrote:

ALI - those three letters bring fear and horror to hearts of many... 😀

In case of SS7 you have to chose between them and VIA MVP3 basically (not counting boards without AGP). None of these are without a flaw and both are comparable 😀

Currently I am investigating why on earth Rayman 2 started to run twice as fast when it "switches" to 60FPS with v-sync turned on. K6-III+ and Voodoo 3 are good enough for just around 50-70FPS with high resolution, so with v-sync on it is just unplayable. It happened all of sudden - I finished half of that game. In the meantime I managed to finish both Evolution and Factory Driver modes in NFS: Porsche. Great game!

I bought second Voodoo 3 - 3000 model this time, and I started to modify it's cooling. What you see on the photo is good for ~185MHz so very poor overclock. I am thinking about one of those orb coolers, because I have one lying around. I missed retro look already with heatpipe cooler 😉

It has 6ns memories unfortunately, but 7ns on Voodoo 2 2000 were good for 175MHz rock-stable so I was hoping for more.

forteller wrote:

It has 6ns memories unfortunately, but 7ns on Voodoo 2 2000 were good for 175MHz rock-stable so I was hoping for more.

Lower is better, this is a latency value.

furan wrote:

forteller wrote:

It has 6ns memories unfortunately, but 7ns on Voodoo 2 2000 were good for 175MHz rock-stable so I was hoping for more.

Lower is better, this is a latency value.

Yes, I know that, but there were 5,5ns 2000 and 3000 (5,5ns were standard on 3500).